Rails' greatest contribution

[...] "This is Rails' greatest contribution
, the one that will last longest, because eventually Rails itself will be usurped and something else will come along to pick at its sun-bleached carcass. But the ecosystem it will have left behind will be healthier because of its contributions."

Regarding technocracy, ...when you delegate decision making to a group of people that are willing to spend time to involve themselves in "the system", there is always a big risk that it's breeding technocracy.

Even if it were true that in these places "people generally participate", you can never achieve a system in which "everybody" participates. By definition, the people that *do* participate are "the new elite", since they are the ones making the decisions.

Because of this, I still see harmonization "only" as a - very important - administrative process, that does not take the responsibility for the final decision making away from the individual. In addition to a harmonization process which develops a suggested consensus, we need a direct democratic control system that can veto the suggested consensus if need be.

"Why a re-introduction? Because JavaScript has a reasonable claim to being the world's most misunderstood programming language. While often derided as a toy, beneath its deceptive simplicity lie some powerful language features. The last year has seen the launch of a number of high profile JavaScript applications, showing that deeper knowledge of this technology is an important skill for any web developer."

A first sneak peek at the things we can expect from
System One
in 2006:
Retrievr
lets you find
flickr
images by drawing rough sketches of them.

"
This article
is not intended as a proposal for a
replacement for email. [...] Nevertheless, in understanding how the move to REST
improves email, you will hopefully come to see how moving your own web services
to it would improve
them
."

Jon Udell points out
that with the ongoing
debate in programming
circles about the pros and cons of static vs dynamic typing and class vs prototype based languages, and with ECMAScript gaining new respect and evolving at a faster pace, perhaps thesestyles will turn out more complementary than we suspect:a programming language can stay neutral to coding practices.

"
When you already know what your types should be, [...], declare them. When you don't, don't. One language,
two styles, complementary benefits. Good idea!"

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